The Importance of Self Interest
by AddictedToPuzzles
Summary: Derek stands over Peter and considers his options.  There are three, but only one matters.  Scott's going to hate him for this.  Vignette from the mind of Derek Hale during the climax of 1x12: Code Breaker.  No warnings apply.


**Warnings: References to past traumatic events, strange characterizations, stream-of-consciousness writing, weird tenses.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Wolf. I just like to play around with the characters' minds. I find it amusing.**

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><p><em>In the fell clutch of circumstance<em>

_I have not winced, nor cried aloud._

_Under the bludgeonings of chance_

_My head is bloody, but unbowed._

- _Invictus_, William Ernest Henley, 1875

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><p>Derek is losing control. It hasn't happened in years, but he can feel it coming up over him now.<p>

This close to letting go, he is more a creature of sensation than rational thought. The chill air clashes with the boiling blood in his veins, the dull ache of three days of capture warring with the sharp pain of the arrowhead still lodged in his leg and the bullet in his chest, and above it all the ancient, primal fury pounding in his head. _Murderer,_ his Wolf snarls, growling at the burned and blistered shape on the ground, _kin-slayer Pack-killer betrayer! _Under the combined rage of both Wolf and self, he sinks to one knee, lets his nails lengthen and sharpen into claws. With a harsh mental jerk he pulls back from that edge, back to the realm of coherency within his own mind. It is a tenuous state, but he achieves it. Barely.

Peter – Uncle Peter, who gave him piggy-back rides and tickled him into submission as a boy of seven, the Alpha who ordered him into submission as a Beta of twenty-two, the lying murderous bastard who stole his submission by slaughtering his true Alpha, and who is past and present and futures rolled into one – gasps in pain beneath him, his cooked flesh scenting the air with putrid stench as he drags in breath after shaky breath. He is an Alpha, though, and Derek can already see the flesh knitting back together, healing. He will not be this vulnerable for long. If they are going to kill him – and they are, there can be no doubt about that – they will have to do it quickly.

His fangs are out, pricking at his lips. He doesn't even remember calling them. And he's growling a little, which is unexpected and vaguely worrying.

Scott's words are indistinct in his ears, but his desperation and panic hit Derek like physical blows. He shuts his eyes against the onslaught, against the _need _in the young Beta's voice. He can smell Scott, although smell is not exactly the right word. As a werewolf, Scott exists in every one of Derek's named senses, and quite a few of the ones that humans don't have words for.

Scott's scent includes deodorant and aftershave and the hormone cocktail that is every teenage boy, and beneath it all the earth-and-moonlight smell–impression of Pack. Derek could pick out his particular odor in a crowded room and track it for miles, so accustomed to it has he become lately. He sounds like a wolf howling for companionship, even when he's not speaking; Derek can hear his loneliness and need for Pack in every movement he makes. He _feels _small and insecure, his aura tentative on the edge of Derek's mind but nonetheless persistently searching for a way in, incessantly pushing at Derek's barriers. He's a tenacious little puppy, and Derek's not quite sure if that's a fond thought or an annoyed one, but either way he's grown used to Scott's constant presence in his life and knows that he doesn't really want it to go away.

He glances back at Scott, takes in the cub's desperate face, his eager eyes, his pleading expression. There is nothing in the world Scott wants more than some rumored, fabled cure, save perhaps Allison. It's impossible to know if the bitten Beta killing his sire will actually reverse his lycanthropy, though Derek suspects not. Scott has been more than human for too long at this point to revert to being a mere mortal.

This is the moment, then. What can he do, other than let Scott try?

Well. There is an answer. There always is.

Scott's not going to like it, though.

Because, the thing is, Derek really doesn't want Scott to stop being a werewolf. Without Scott he would be alone, all alone, more completely alone than he had ever been before. Quite possibly the only thing keeping him sane right now is the fact that, in some odd, twisted way, he and Scott are Pack. More or less.

Brothers, he had said that first night in the woods, looking into the frightened and confused eyes of a little boy thrust into a world too big and too strange for him to understand, and he had meant it. But Pack is so much more than that, so much deeper; support, trust, love, affection, safety and strength and solidarity. And Pack is what Derek had lost.

Kate Argent – he nearly spits reflexively when he thinks the name, feels a thrill of visceral pleasure at the fact that he can still scent her lifeblood in the stale air – had ripped his Pack away from him, not just the true Pack but the pseudo-Pack of his human relatives. She had used his trust and naivety and love against him, had laughed as she burned his world alive.

That night, he had lost Pack for the first time. It lasted all of two minutes before Laura bound them together in blood and pain and despair, as was her right as an Alpha, but it left effects lingering in his psyche. He would bear the scars of that first traumatic loss for the rest of his life.

And then was the running, with his sister as his new everything. She wasn't much, but she was there, and he lost count of the nights they spent curled around each other for warmth, covered in each other's scents, sleeping in their sibling's arms. For five years she was his Pack. She had become his world, as they fled California, travelled the continent to Oregon and Minnesota, to Illinois and New York and even up through Maine into Canada, always one step ahead of the hunters and one step behind anyone who could help them. Always only the two of them.

Then she was torn away too, on the very land where his family had burned, and he was alone again but for a strange Alpha who seemed to have no interest in him. He had nearly lost himself, then, so tempted by the painful howling void inside him to simply let go, because without Pack he was nothing. Less than nothing. A Beta without an Alpha, no more than a scared little boy trying desperately to hold on to something that had long since been stripped from him.

And then: Scott. New, fresh blood, bright and sparkling and a bit of an idiot. Bitten on the first moon of the year, the Wolf Moon, the moon that meant family and togetherness and initiation. Bitten six years exactly by the lunar reckoning from the day Derek lost everything, which was far more important for lycanthropic matters than the solar calendar humans kept. Young, but that could be excused. Willing to fight, though, willing to stand up to Derek even though the older Beta had years and pounds and experience on him. Scott had spirit, Scott had vigor, Scott had will. Scott, Derek found, was all too easy to assign that big, huge, important word to.  
><em>Pack.<em>

Because as long as Scott is a werewolf, even if Peter dies – _as he has to,_ his Wolf asserts, _for slaughtering Laura_ – he still won't be alone. He'll have Scott, and Scott will have him, and there will be Pack. Even if it is just a weird little Pack of two. He can survive with two - he's done it before - but he wouldn't be able to make it on his own. Not again.

So there are two options. Well, three, but two of them are really the same.

He can let Scott kill Peter. If the cure doesn't work, they're fine, though he may have to have Words with the hunters, to convince them that Wolf business is Wolf business and that killing Scott is still a violation of their precious Code. If the cure doesn't work, he still has Pack, Scott is bound more tightly to him, and almost everyone is happy. Excepting Allison, perhaps, and definitely her father and the other hunters. And maybe Stiles too, and probably Jackson. This is still an outcome he can tolerate, though, because the only really important person in his life is mostly satisfied.

He can let Scott kill Peter. If the cure works, Scott becomes human again, and the pain of being all by himself rips him in half. He will have lost Pack for a third time, and as they say, the third time is the charm. He has to wonder how it will happen. Will he retain himself enough to make it quick and noble, or will he go mad and slaughter his way through Beacon Hills until the Argents finally put him down and saunter off with a mortal,_ human _Scott in tow? This outcome is… undesirable.

Or, on the other hand…

He can't let Scott kill Peter. That much is clear. The rumors of the cure are faint and vague, second-hand at best, but Derek will no longer tolerate Scott being human. It is not a possibility. He simply will not allow it.

The final option is… selfish. Possibly – definitely – the most supremely selfish thing he's ever even considered doing.

He looks down at Peter, burned and broken beneath him. Selfish, he thinks, he can live with. Selfish means Scott would never be able to leave him. Selfish would enable him to expand their weird little Pack of two into a weird little Pack of more. Selfish is tolerable. Selfish might even be preferable.

He hasn't been selfish in years. The last purely self-serving act he performed was bringing his lover to his house for an evening, and that had resulted in his family burning alive. Since then he'd been acting for the good of his Pack, be that Laura, Scott, or Peter. Now, he thinks, maybe it's time to start looking after himself again, instead of letting an Alpha dictate his life. Maybe it's his turn to take, instead of giving of himself until there's nothing left but hate and pain. Maybe it's time to be self-serving.

Scott is going to hate him. That's okay, because Scott doesn't have to like him to be his Pack. All Scott has to do is _be_ his Pack.

Peter growls out words at him, able to sense his decision, and even though Derek is barely listening he understands his uncle's meaning. Peter knows, in these moments, what Derek has decided. He may even know why. Derek's weakness, fear, and pain might be laid bare for the dying Alpha to see. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters but here, and now, and what he does next.

What he does for his Pack. For himself.

Scott is going to hate him for this.

Derek reaches down and chooses the selfish route.


End file.
